Fuzzy about Visitors

Not all the visitors to the Roediger House strut around on just two legs. Here's Cass, who's now stopped by a couple of times. And he's a cutie.

Happy Birthday Meal: No. 147

It started last year, when I got to thinking about how I wanted to celebrate my birthday. And since I like whipping up meals and having people over, that's the plan I got in my head and decided to repeat this year. Since I'm such a fan of red meat, the only decision was which kind of beef would be the featured entree.

I decided to go with a boneless ribeye roast.



For the appetizer, I liked the idea of making small crabcakes again, but I tried out a new recipe that had some Asian inspiration to it. I still went with the amazing garlic-chile-lime aioli that was shared with me by good friends in New Jersey.



The salad is the closest imitation I can make of a much-loved salad offered at the Ryan's Restaurant on Coliseum Drive here in town, a finer dining establishment that was always a good place to go on special occasions. The recipe for this salad and its sweet-and-sour vinaigrette was tracked down by my college roommate Jimmy Randolph; he pulled it from Southern Living. It is a spiced pecan and blue cheese salad where all the flavors just seem to blend wonderfully.



I did not like the final result with the roast; I feel like I've had much better beef than this. The shiitake mushroom cream sauce was also a little on the bland side. But if you look closely at the plate below, you might notice something funny about the Brussels sprouts: they are deep-fried. This is a Michael Symon recipe as found on the Food Network's website, and I wanted to try it because I had these at two of his restaurants last month (one in Cleveland, and one in Detroit). They were pretty darned good.

Meal No. 146: Ribeyes and Steak Fries

I guess it's safe to say that I'm a fan of Amazon Prime. I'm nearing the end of my one-month trial and I expect to find it well worth it to pay for a year's membership in order to secure 2-day free shipping on most things I order from them.

Take, for instance, the speed with which I was able to obtain a deep fat fryer once I decided I had to have one. I ordered it on Thursday afternoon and FedEx brought it to the house late Saturday morning. That means it was just in time to put into service for last night's meal of ribeyes and steak fries.



I was happy to receive the benefit of some overstocking at 6th & Vine this past week: they do not have a fryer and so fries are not on the menu. When Sysco Food Distributors ended up dropping off steak fries with a recent order, I was happy to take a bag off their hands. It's awesome to control the cooking of them, so's I can get them good and crispy like I like 'em.



The grill was just right and the steaks sizzled and cooked wonderfully while some light rain continued to fall last evening.



I am such a fan of filet mignon and that's about all I ever buy, but I'm glad to be rediscovering ribeyes. Last night's steaks came from Sam's Club and, like always, the meat was mighty good. And being able to eat a Saturday night meal of steak and fries took me directly back to growing up in Buies Creek, where that was what we ate more than any other single meal, I bet. All the taste memories came flooding back. It was delicious.



And since I'd made some peach ice cream the other morning, why not serve it up for dessert?

Saturday Stuff Sweeps the City

If there were any question about how happening the City of Winston-Salem has turned out to be, look no further than the busy calendar of events for this single September Saturday. The map and list of events on the right should give you some idea. And fortunately, this time around, these many events did not involve the closure of Spring Street.

However, Fourth Street just above the house was closed as part of the CrimeStoppers 5K Race for Justice, and it meant that at about 9 this morning, there were cars that didn't know where to go or what to do in front of the house. One fool even parked blocking the driveway of Radar Security Alarm, Inc., across from the house, which left the guy just coming off a 12-hour shift pretty peeved when he couldn't get out.

Late morning and early afternoon, the sounds overhead from helicopters and planes and jets could be heard, as the Air Show was happening out at Smith-Reynolds Airport.

I did go up to 6th & Vine today, which put me around the two events that caused Sixth and Trade Streets to be closed: the Bookmarks Festival and the St. Baldrick's Foundation Fundraiser.

Ah, but it was good to be back home in the Roediger House once I was through running around.

Mature Mantis at the Window

I have no way to know and can't prove it one way or the other, but I'd like very much to think that the praying mantis I spotted clinging to the screen of one of the kitchen bay windows a few nights ago is the same one I met as a baby back in mid-July.

Morning Making of Peach Ice Cream

I love white peaches, and when they went on sale at Lowe's Grocery, I went a bit overboard in buying them. So I ended up with more than I needed and figured I might as well try them in a peach ice cream recipe. I prepped the mix a day or so ago but had not gotten around to freezing it, so that's what I did between getting up this morning and getting ready for my workday.



How many people do you know who were making ice cream at 7 am?

Ah, but I don't think white peaches have a strong enough flavor to them, so this is not going to be among my best ice creams, I'm afraid. Still, it will be good to have on-hand for a quick dessert if the situation calls for it.

Meal No. 145: Don't Turn the Page on Sage

WINSTON-SALEM, NC [AP]: There is a report this evening of a serious food coma in a residence on Spring Street in the Holly Avenue Neighborhood in downtown Winston-Salem, NC. Apparently, the parmesan-crusted chicken breasts with a lemon-sage butter sauce were so incredible that the owner of this historic home ate himself into a body-numbing food coma. With sides of baby Brussels sprouts, whipped potatoes, and one of last night's homemade buttermilk biscuits, this Wednesday evening dinner was apparently too much, and the victim is attempting to recover without seeking medical treatment by sitting in his easy chair by the fireplace in the kitchen. Events will continue to be monitored and updates posted as the situation changes.

Now, back to you.

Parmesan-Crusted Chicken
with a Lemon-Sage Butter Sauce

Meal No. 144: Sage Crusted Roast Pork

Too soon for a repeat? I don't think so.

This evening's meal: Sage Crusted Roast Pork with vegetables, baked potato, a fantastic mushroom cream sauce, some homemade buttermilk biscuits, and some more of that dulce de leche cheesecake bar dessert.

Meal No. 143: Ginger Chicken Stir-Fry

Time to hit the wok again, and to try a repeat of the very delicious Ginger Chicken Stir-Fry.



But I do not think it was as good this evening as it was a couple of weeks ago. Not sure why. Still, it makes a most attractive dish, no?

Meal No. 142: Glazed Meat Loaf

I decided this evening to make something new for me: meat loaf. I turned to a recipe in Cook's Country (Feb/March 2009, p. 8-9), which I find pretty trustworthy and good at guiding me about putting together certain dishes, and they did not steer me wrong. I was especially happy with how the glaze/sauce turned out and, since I did overcook the meat loaf a bit, the sauce was all the more helpful.



If you study the above picture carefully, you may notice that there's a considerable stretch of real estate on it that remains unfilled. I mean, there's a slab of meat loaf and there are some tasty green beans, but shouldn't there be something else? Turns out I read another new recipe a bit too quickly, and didn't realize it would take about an hour longer to prepare than I was figuring on. So this meal took place in stages.



Also from Cook's Country (Oct/Nov 2010, p. 17) came a recipe for onions and potatoes au gratin, and not only did it take way too long to make and cook, it was also not that good. So that recipe will go the way of a few others and never be seen or heard of again in the Roediger House.

Dessert was also a new recipe, and I am sure it will be a keeper.



What you see here is a pan of dulce de leche cheesecake bars (Bon Appétit, June 2010; personal clippings). Not too hard to fix, although since it calls for prepared/store-bought dulce de leche, I had to go to three grocery stores before I could track it down. (Thank you, Food Lion on Peters Creek Parkway.)



This is my piece before I dug in. And I could only eat about half of it...it's pretty rich. But it's also mighty good.

Meal No. 141: Shrimp Po'Boys

It is a fine Saturday evening on Labor Day weekend, and today was a gorgeous day. It was very relaxing to have coffee on the front porch this morning and to watch the birds at the feeders.

This evening seemed a good time to give Shrimp Po'Boys another go. I'd made them once before, back in May 2010, but I thought the breading on the shrimp that time was too heavy. That time, the recipe I was following involved a batter that cooked up too thick on the shrimp, and it really obscured their flavor.

This time I went with a tempura batter and I liked the result much more. I also dosed 'em up with some remoulade in addition to the onion-garlic mayo from the recipe magazine I was using, but instead of french rolls, I got some good looking deli-made sandwich buns. With some fresh-sliced tomato, a spring mix salad, and a cold Xingu beer, I was happy to settle in for a startling episode ("Hungry Man") of Dexter Season 4 on DVD.

---

Shrimp Po'Boys: Taste of Home April/May 2003, p. 16.

Meal No. 140: Tuna w/Ginger Shiitake Sauce

It's a seafood kind of ending to the week, because tonight's fare also comes from the fresh catch seafood case at my local Harris Teeter.

It's a repeat of a meal so recently had, but darn it, it's just scrumptious stuff. So I don't mind tossing this back in my gullet and walking away from the meal completely satisfied. There is the added bonus of the new rice cooker, which performed superbly again.

The dish this evening: pan-seared tuna medallions with ginger shiitake mushroom sauce (which was about as good as it's ever been this evening) over a bed of basmati rice. Alongside, some salad. Washing it down: Washington Hills late harvest riesling. In front of me: the next episodes in Season 4 of Dexter.

Overall, a good Friday night at the Roediger House, capped off by a post W-S Dash-game visit by good friends the Jens.

---

"Pan-Seared Tuna with Ginger-Shiitake Cream Sauce," from The Bon Appétit Cookbook by Barbara Fairchild, 2006, p. 398-399.

Meal No. 139: Salmon w/Tarragon Mushroom Sauce

First things first: I have a birthday coming up soon, and today I was given a very thoughtful early gift.

A New Rice Cooker
You see, I don't know what the deal is, but I have the darnedest time getting rice right. It's usually still too wet or requires considerably more time than package directions suggest. It is a new problem for me, since I've been in this house, because I don't remember rice being a challenge to me in the past. Anyway, imagine the pleasure I experienced of having this dandy new appliance, and just in time to whip up some basmati rice to go with this evening's meal.

Pan-Seared Wild-Caught Sockeye Salmon
There were some beautiful slabs of salmon fillets at Lowe's grocery this morning, and they were not to be resisted. I'm darned glad I got them. I did the simple pan-searing of them, with a bit of kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper.


I also decided to try out a new accompaniment for it this evening: tarragon mushroom sauce. Here it is in its thickened state. It's actually got a little kick to it, thanks to a dash or two of cayenne pepper.


Throw some asparagus in the steamer, and in the end, it's a truly delicious meal. Just the thing for watching the next episodes as I work my way through Season 4 of Dexter.



Tarragon & Mushroom Sauce: 400 Sauces by Atkinson, France, and Mayhew (2006,2008), p. 184

Movie Nights: Few & Far Between

Not sure if I just made it a crazy travel season, or if there have been too many other pursuits to pursue, but this summer has not shaped up to be all that huge on movie nights. And yet the movie nights are always a lot of fun, so I'm hating that they've just not been happening.

But I'll use this as an excuse to post a photo from early in the summer when I got around to doing some repair and tightening on the movie screen frame, along with clean-up of the rotting leaves and construction sawdust that had accumulated at the base.

Holy Crapgrass

All my cutting of the lawn this summer has actually ended up having a negative effect: it's staying so well-trimmed that, with the dry conditions of late, it's allowed an invasion of crabgrass to take hold. This stuff is yucky and ridiculously rapid-spreading! Since I'm on the road so much, I fear I've already lost this battle.

I'm also a little surprised, because it's not been that long ago that I did a pretty thorough treatment with Weed-Be-Gone, and the cautions on the label warn against more than a couple of doses in a year. But I think I'd better get ahold of a crabgrass-specific means of abatement. My little bit of research this evening also tells me I've got to do a better job of fertilizing and watering my lawn...a thick healthy tall growth of my preferred grass is a sufficient incentive to keep away the crabgrass weed.

I'll put this on the list of things to do when I'm home tomorrow and through the weekend.

Cut Palm Sunday

This is the gladware container of fruit that I was cutting up yesterday.



This is the palm of my hand after the knife ran out of resistance on one of the peaches and dug right on into me. I had a hard time looking at the crevasse in my flesh once the blade had done its darnedest. It took quite a while for it to stop bleeding, but it was the insistent soreness that has lasted hours upon end that has gotten me worse. I love spending time in the kitchen and I do a lot of hand-washing and hand-washing of dishes, and this put a real kink in my usual routines. By Sunday evening, it was feeling better, though.

Meal No. 138: Steak & Pommes Frites

This might be where I'm going a bit off the rails. Tonight's meal: extra thick cut pan-seared ribeye steaks as the main dish. On the side, hand-cut russet potato french fries and super-simmered carmelized onions (that are so long-simmered they look more like mashed sweet potatoes in the photograph). And a port wine demi-glace reduction that was hellaciously delectable. This meal knocked my socks off: the ribeye was perfectly cooked, the carmelized onions were like a dessert unto themselves, the pommes frites were blasts of fried potato flavor, and the sauce was simply inspired. I wish I had taken a picture of the ribeye after I cut into it, but I had already started the next episode of Dexter Season 4 and didn't want to interrupt to go back downstairs for my camera. And I didn't think about my Droid on my hip until I was actually typing this into the blog. Shucks.

Gracious. And now my belly is poking out rather ridiculously, and I don't care one bit.

Meal No. 137: Stir-Fry Ginger Cashew Chicken

Oh, it's so good to be at home and to have time to knock around the kitchen a bit. With an eye to greatly improving on my last attempt at this particular chicken recipe for the wok, I decided to take some creative license.



Fresh-grated gingerroot, fresh mushrooms, fresh red bell pepper, fresh-minced cilantro, fresh (not frozen!) chicken breasts, roasted cashew halves...the extra effort to coat the chicken pieces in egg white and cornstarch before actually deep-frying them briefly prior to adding them to the wok...

...and it was all to a good end. This was one fabulous meal.

Blue Light Special

The Roediger House is downtown, and that gives me more than my fair share of emergency vehicle action. Strangely, a North Carolina highway patrolman is virtually never to be seen on these mean city streets. But while I was working by the fireside this evening, the flash of blue strobe caught my eye and I found there was a small measure of excitement out on Fourth Street. This picture is from the upstairs back bedroom, looking across the gravel lot beside the house toward the action. And yes, that's one of those honking big Hummer limousines parked in the far lot across Fourth Street. This is a happening city.

Meal No. 136: Salmon with Thai Chili Sauce

A light meal to fill my belly before I hit the road this evening for a quick workday down in Richmond County, NC:



This is broiled salmon with a thai chili sauce. I went a little wild with the side dishes, though: rice with the extra chili sauce, cooked carrots, zucchini, and even feta-stuffed roasted red peppers.

And I was hungry again before I got halfway to Richmond County.

Meal No. 135: Seafood Pasta

It's been over a week since I've been able to cook a meal, and I'm still recovering from making the drive straight home from Detroit last night. So I threw together a meal based on a recipe I got some years ago: seafood pasta alfredo. It's a quick version with cream cheese built in for the cheating, along with fake crab meat and ready-cooked chicken and shrimp. I can't believe I actually made a meal with all these shortcuts, but I was on a deadline.

But boy-howdy, it's a lot more expensive to make a meal this way than the way I normally do, so I'll be sure to think it through next time I've got a hankering for this dish.

The Grim Peeper

Death has flocked to the Roediger House in my absence.

When I returned home from my trip to Cleveland and Detroit, I found that a bit of a freak accident had occurred at the squirrel-proof bird feeder outside the kitchen bay windows. Some poor little house sparrow (I think?) was all-too-determined to get at the remnants of black oil sunflower seed in my nearly-empty feeder, and he got himself stuck.

In fact, he did such a bang-up job of it that where you see his head is actually one slot over from where his neck is. I think he died a traumatic death. But I don't consider the feeder a death-trap...I really do think this was a freak accident. And I'll just need to make sure I'm keeping it full of food so that no other hungry bellies compel his cousins to stick their necks out. Or in.

Don't want it to be Bye Bye Birdie all over again.

Dinner in Windsor, Ontario, O Canada

You know that if I had my druthers, I'd be at home at the Roediger House every night, and I'd be cooking up a storm in my kitchen. But that's not the nature of my work as an educational consultant, and on this particular week, it means I'm quite a ways from home. Today and tomorrow, I'm working at the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse of Detroit, a charter school that I first did training for back in 2005. They very kindly invited me back...there's a large number of new faculty and it was time to get reacquainted with key ideas about teaching and learning and comprehension-based instruction.

Tonight, with brand-new passport in hand, I had the chance to slip across the Ambassador Bridge into Windsor, Ontario, for a walk and drive around and dinner at a reasonably authentic Chinese restaurant. This shot is looking across the Detroit River at downtown Detroit, which looks much better from across the river than it does in person.

Coffee in Cleveland: Knowing the Drill

Before leaving my good hosts Jon and Karissa Piper in Cleveland this morning, I was treated to some freshly-ground and excellent coffee. Jon's put up an old-fashioned wall-mounted ceramic coffee grinder, but he's discovered that it's tedious to crank it by hand.

So he affixed a bolt to it and keeps his cordless drill nearby, and he lets the tool do all the work for him. Jon's a funny guy.

While I recognize that the Roediger House might seem like a large abode to some, you've not seen anything until you roam around the Pipers' Cleveland Heights household. I've got a great old downtown house; they've got themselves a veritable mansion. It's an impressive place.

Lolita's in Cleveland

I would not be in the Roediger House if it were not for the foresight and encouragement of my good friends Karissa and Jon Piper, who at one time were my neighbors down the street. Karissa was in my first group of education students when I joined the faculty at Wake Forest in 2001, and she returned to complete her masters with me a couple of years later.

Today's post is not about the Roediger House but about the joyful fact that I get to be with them this evening. They live in Cleveland now, and this was a great excuse to stop in for an overnighter with them on my way to work at a charter school in Detroit the first of the coming week.

Today's photo: Jon grabbing up the center bone from his delicious lamb chop at Michael Symon's restaurant, Lolita's, where the demand is so great the earliest reservations we could get were for 9:15 pm.

Holes, But Not By Louis Sachar

When Pete LaRoque was here trying to figure out that darned leak that's dripping above the wetbar in the kitchen, he needed to get a better look at the most likely direction the water was coming from. So he had to do some cutting into the wall at the end of the tub in the Van Gogh bathroom upstairs. It let him know that the problem does not seem to be associated with the water supply lines for that bathroom, and specifically for that tub/shower (which had not been used for a while prior to the leak appearing).

Cookies for Nelson County, Virginia

Before leaving home last night, I managed to get a batch of milk chocolate oatmeal cookies prepared. It seems I do not find enough time to do this in connection with all my travels, but I like sharing some goodies from the kitchen with the people in the school divisions I work with.

Nelson County is south of Charlottesville and is better known as the "home" of the Waltons. It's a lovely county and I've always been warmly welcomed there by the educators with whom I work. And the cookies were an early hit, so I'm expecting to have none that I'll need to bring back home with me when I wrap things up on Friday afternoon.

Meal No. 134: Center-Cut Pork Chops

After having that great ginger shiitake mushroom sauce with last night's tuna steaks, and having no small amount left over, what better menu this evening than some center-cut pork chops, with a flavorful coating and cooked in a healthy dose of melted butter?

Fordhook lima beans and mashed potatoes were alongside. That's some amazing Xingu black beer from Brazil to help wash this good stuff down.

Unfortunately, only one beer was allowed, because I have to hit the road for a couple of days of work up in Nelson County this week.

Meal No. 133: Tuna Steaks

This was just a good relaxing day to tackle prep for a fine dinner, with great fresh ingredients and full of amazing flavors.



This night's fare: seared tuna steaks with ginger shiitake mushroom cream sauce, along with a side of rice and sugar snap peas.

---

"Pan-Seared Tuna with Ginger-Shiitake Cream Sauce," from The Bon Appétit Cookbook by Barbara Fairchild, 2006, p. 398-399.